'Scandal' – 'Blown Away' recap: Fool for love

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So Huck didn’t shoot the president — which you may have assumed, because as gray an area as the main characters on “Scandal” inhabit, the show would never go that dark.

We learned Thursday (Dec. 13), though, who did shoot Fitz — if not exactly why. It all seems to lead back to the voter fraud that put Fitz in office, but the show is diving deeper and deeper into conspiracy-land (it’s adjacent to Shondaland), so it’s not yet clear who ordered the hit.

What we do know is this: Olivia Pope and Associates is staffed with people who have lots of trouble staying rational when love enters the picture. The real shooter — via a remote-controlled sniper rifle — is Huck’s AA girlfriend Becky, who’s an assassin like Huck and has been setting him up but good.

She may even have had actual feelings for him, but that goes out the window — along with the lives of the innocent, normal family Huck liked to spy on — when she bugs his phone and he tells Harrison to plant the gun in her apartment. Huck was covering his bases, sure but there’s no reason to doubt he really did love her. In this instance, though, his feelings toward her may have clouded his judgment a little, and cost four people their lives.

None of that, though — nor the fact that he met Olivia in public just steps outside the White House grounds, with soldiers walking around everywhere in the background — is what gets Huck caught at the end of the episode. The information on his whereabouts presumably comes from Verna, who sacrifices Huck to Sally in order to keep her spot on the Supreme Court.

That, and Hollis Doyle’s gloating to Olivia outside the Oval Office, seems to be leading back to Cytron. The questions now are who hired Becky (our money is on Hollis at the moment) and who stands to gain the most from the president being incapacitated.

On that front, Sally is at the top of the list. She wasn’t officially connected to the Amanda Tanner story last season — her chief of staff took the fall — but she’s clearly been preparing for her moment and has wasted no time seizing the reins of power. Still, it’s probably a stretch to say she’s the one pulling the strings.

Right now, a version of the Hollis Doyle theory we floated last week seems to make the most sense. While everyone involved in the Cytron plot has a lot to lose, Hollis seems like the one with the means and the wide amoral streak to engineer such a plot.

This is “Scandal” we’re talking about, though, so the four episodes remaining in this story arc (signs point to the show resolving this mystery before jumping into another one with its back nine) could feature at least that many red herrings and reversals. The breakneck pace means Shonda Rhimes and Co. will keep piling twist upon twist, so it’s anyone’s guess where we end up.